Michael Hibbard

All about the books I write, along with random thoughts, and babbling.

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Connections

Greetings, Dreamers!

I apologize for the hiatus on something meaningful and thought-provoking, but the common reality has a way of getting in the way of what I wish to explore.

Today, I am going to discuss connections, for I feel that there is a need to further explore how we are all One, and how this is possible. The more we can accept this simple truth the more chance we have of saving ourselves — and yes, it is a truth that I firmly and staunchly believe.

“Things fall apart — the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” – The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

This was the first poem I ever read when I started my English degree. The class was British Modern Age Literature and this poem, of all the wonderful poems in Yeats’ body of work, has haunted me for my entire adult life. But to put it in context of how it relates to our world is that We are all the center that cannot hold because we have lost our connections to the hub that is our Oneness — the singularity that binds us, yet allows us to explore our universe from different perspectives while sharing our observations.

My day job is filled with data analysis and I use artificial intelligences, namely neural networks, to process data. But, coding these automatons requires a deeper understanding of the biological construct which inspired them — the human brain. In the figure pictured above, you see how the billions of neurons in your brain are connected. When the mind is thinking, it is a storm of electrical surges that ripple like lightning over a rain filled thundercloud. Each neuron is connected, directly or indirectly to the whole through cause and effect. Each neuron processes a bit of information, and signals other connected neurons to fire and assist in the deduction of the appropriate response. For instance, when you see an apple, neurons fire that process color (red), shape (apple), ontology (fruit), context (edible) and spacial (distance). All happening at the speed of light, to deduce that what you are seeing is in fact an apple. But this does not happen without learning — i.e. positive and negative reinforcement.

An artificial intelligence is like a child. It must be trained and given experience. We train it by giving it known things. Such as, if we want a neural network to be able to recognize faces, we given it pictures and have it find them. When it is right, we “reward” it by telling it that it answered correctly. When it is wrong, we “scold” it. This process continues until we feel that the AI has a good grasp on what the general shape of a face is, but we do not over teach it, because we know that not all faces are created equal. Also, if we are processing photos, lighting, age, weight and other obstructions, can be hard to distinguish. We want the AI to be able to come to a conclusion on its own, with our gentle nudging in the right direction.

This is a typical layout for a very simple AI. We have three inputs, which are the variables or traits we know. The hidden layer connects all of the input neurons to the output neurons, and acts as the “memory” of known answers. This memory is all governed by very simple equations that strengthen or weaken connections between certain neurons. The stronger the connections, the more likely they will fire and produce the correct answer.

Now, you may be asking, why do I care about any of this? It’s very simple. If you look at the world, with every living organism as a neuron, we have connections. And, when we work in tandem, we produce an outcome. Sometimes we stay “wired” to one another, and produce a similar outcome, other times, we drift apart and make different connections, different outcomes. I have observed people in different settings. In one setting they will come up with different outcomes to the same inputs, depending on who they are with. As an example, you what to go to a movie. If you go with Group A, you will probably see a Romantic Comedy. If you go with Group B, you will probably go see a Horror film. The outcome is governed by the collective behavior and connections within that group. And if you decide you don’t want to see Romantic Comedies any longer, you will drift further from Group A when it comes to movie going, until the connection is weakened and possibly lost.

The point of this particular rambling is to punctuate that we as living organisms, not just humans, but all living things, function as a global mind. It is a very difficult concept to accept for many because it infringes on the “self”. However, every neuron in your brain is an individual, yet it must have input and connections to the rest of the brain to be of use. If it is not being used, it simply dies.

This is just another example of how we are all connected. Our global mind produces the outcomes that we experience in day-to-day life. And if the outcomes are not what we want, we must relearn, retrain ourselves, until we can achieve what it is we want. “Things fall apart”, yes, they have and do. But it within our power to make amends before the “rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”.

This is my hypothesis on Oneness, and I am opening the floor to be challenged on the validity of my analogy as I formulate a cogent theory of Oneness and Global Consciousness.